DON'T JUDGE A BOOKSELLER BY HER COVER

I am a lot of things but I'm not a ponderer of tattoos, particularly if they were to be transported to me. I have quite a few fears but one that stands out is that I will wake up one day after a drinking spree and find myself sporting an inky mark on my face.

Tattoos are my taboos. But don't get me wrong, my patterned friend, I speak for and of myself only. (And the one significant reason I have is something I heard from a co-worker: tattoo removal invokes the use of laser, and no scent is more awful than the smell of one's burnt skin).

My family is worse. Despite their liberalism, they think tattoos are low and tend to bring a person's politics down.

Am not sure about that, specially in a city as postmodern as Miami. You actually go to South Beach and find tattoed epidermis within every square yard of land. Give it to the hip shops on Alton Road and Ocean Drive - their hipness will probably entice you to be pricked, first and foremost, on your biceps.

H, my gringa admin of 7 or so years, came back from maternity hiatus some weeks back sporting an enormous tattoo on her lower back. In pretty font with lots of little flowers and butterflies, her smooth back now screams the name of the newborn son.

Prior to this constitutional graffiti, the only other tattoo that H sported was the small blazing sun on the back of her neck. Somehow I have a personal stake on that tattoo - if only for the fact that before that, she asked me, like an agitating daughter to dad, C, can I have a tattoo of R's (the boyfriend's) name on my butt?

Have you ever seen a boy scout on traffic patrol and waiting for pedestrians to cross either sides? Did you notice their fully extended stiff-armed stop signal to motorists? I was that to H when I responded, "Do me a favor, talk to the hand".

"OK, OK", she said. "Can I have another tattoo then"?

"Only if it's possibly coverable", I said, firmly.
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But as I now think about it, do I ever judge people by their tattoos? Or better yet, do I ever judge persons by the kind of tattoos they have?

Maybe I did. I used to think of those who have tattoos all over the place like a house covered with messy and mismatched wallpaper as expressive grungists or existentialists or anarchists with little or no predilection to classic art.

Until I encountered this young lady at my neighborhood bookstore the other day. She was the attending cashier when I was called in to pay for my merchandise, the dvd Before Night Falls with Javier Bardem. "That's a very sad movie", she said in a very melancholy tone. I looked at her and wondered if she was ever capable of sadness; the face had tatoos and, take away the voice and facial expression, I was only perceiving anger.

"Did you like it?", I asked.

"I adore it. I love poetry, Latin American poetry", she said in a voice resembling an angel's.

After I gave her the cash, she shocked me a second time.

"You're shirt reminds of Klimt", she said, beaming a very lovable squint.

I was wearing my favorite yellow shirt with little squares and cirles shaded in black - and true enough, as I later surmised, they verily looked like a painting by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian painter in the 19th-20th century who specialized in Byzantine art and whose paintings extol the themes of birth and sensuality.

"You like Klimt"?, I asked.

"You bet I do", she said, throwing a smile that can only be described as veracious.